peculiar to men, such as alcoholism, etc. Mr. Tracy Robinson, in his book of personal reminiscences, 'Fifty Years at Panama," speaks authoritatively on the use of liquor in the tropics as follows:

66

"Many foreigners have fallen victims to fear rather than fever; while many others have wrought their own destruction by drink, which is the greatest curse of mankind in all lands, but more especially in hot countries. It has killed, directly and indirectly, more than the entire list of diseases put together; for it induces by its derangement of the vital forces, every ill to which flesh is heir. Candor compels me to state that I have tried both abstinence and moderate indulgence; and when it is said that strong drink is necessary in the tropics to tone the system up, or for any good purpose under heaven, I say emphatically, it is not so! It is absolutely best to let it entirely alone. My fifty years' experience gives me authority to write as I do."

Allowance must be made, in considering the favorable health showing on the Isthmus, to the fact that the employees in one sense are picked men. They must be in sound condition when employed and usually in the prime of life. Another thing that has kept the death rate down among the Americans has been the practice of returning to the United States many patients who apparently had not long to live.

Thus their deaths were not a charge against the Canal Zone.

It cannot be assumed that all the deaths from disease in the Canal Zone were from causes that originated there. The diseases peculiar to the tropics have not claimed as many victims among the Americans as the diseases peculiar to the northern climates. But there has been a steady improvement, as may be noted in a fall in the death rate among the Americans, from 8.14 per 1,000 in 1907 to 5.14 per 1,000 in 1911.

An incident in the sanitary government of the Isthmus was an Executive Order by President Taft, effective on December 12, 1911, which prohibited the practice of any system of therapeutics or healing that the Sanitary Department, the allopathic school, should rule against. The President, upon its possible application to create a monopoly of healing in the Canal Zone being pointed out to him, revoked the order on January 1, 1912.

Employees are not permitted to remain in their homes or quarters when sick, but must go to the Colon or Ancon hospital, unless the district physician expressly rules otherwise. The hospital grounds at Ancon are beautiful, and convalescent patients are sent to Taboga Island, ten miles out in Panama Bay, for final treatment. A dairy with 125 cows supplies fresh milk to the Ancon hospital.

At first Col. Gorgas was not a member of the Isthmian Canal Commission. But the extraordinary ability he displayed resulted in the separation of the Sanitary Department from the jurisdiction of the Gov

ernor of the Canal Zone, and on February 28, 1907, Col. Gorgas was made a member of the Commission, with the Department of Sanitation having equal dignity with other grand divisions of the work. He is the only official of the highest rank who has been with the canal project from its earliest days to the present.

The cost of the sanitary conquest of the Isthmus, to July 1, 1912, was the somewhat impressive total of $15,000,000. Here, as in the pay and treatment of employees, the government has sought results without regard to the expense. For the remaining days of the canal the cost of sanitation will be approximately $2,500,000, or $17,500,000 in all by January 1, 1914, which amount is nearly $3,000,000 less than the cost estimated for the department in 1908.

The first grand lesson from the life cost of the Panama Canal is that the tropics no longer offer insuperable obstacles to the health of northern races. For all South and Central America the work of the Americans in Panama teaches the imperative necessity of a literal belief in the old adage: "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." At every single point where disease has dominated the situation, it has been found that filth abounded. Guayaquil, in Ecuador, sometimes is quarantined half the year, and it is a significant fact that this has been one of the dirtiest ports in South America. Any people who are willing to live indecently will pay the penalty in a high death rate.

When the ordinary cleanliness to which the American, or the European, is accustomed is observed in the tropics, and if intoxicants are not permitted to

dominate the individual life, there will not be the slightest difficulty in living near the Equator. The ultimate crowding of North America will force population into Central and South America, and among the world benefits of the Panama Canal none is more flattering to the Americans than just this lesson that he who will live decently may live healthfully.

CHAPTER III

H

THE SPANISH IN PANAMA

ISTORIANS have noted that certain members

of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms have played a vital part in the discovery and colonization of the Americas.

Columbus, the master spirit of his age, had the noble, imaginative conception of the earth's rotundity which he wished to demonstrate to mankind, but his immediate impulse was to find the shortest passage to the East Indies, where the spices so much prized on the dining tables of Europe could be obtained and brought back more expeditiously than by the long trip around the Cape of Good Hope.

To the North, more than a hundred years later, tobacco was the main product that held the English colonists to Virginia in the face of hostile savages and exile from home. Smoking spread over Europe like an epidemic, making the rewards from the cultivation of the weed immediate and profitable from the

start.

The members of the mineral kingdom which held the venturesome mariners to their new found lands, despite every discouragement, human and natural, were gold and silver. No sooner had these precious metals crossed the European vision than their first love, spices, faded completely out of the imagination.